Getting to Know You

 My wife and I have been married a long time. We've known each other just a little longer than we've been a couple. We have a great relationship. Go back and read the second sentence again. We "rushed in." Elvis may think us foolish but it worked out pretty well. I love her as much as I ever did and I'm pretty sure she means it when she says she loves me. We have a nice time together. We enjoy one another's company. Even the romance is still strong, nudge nudge wink wink say no more! 

I believe the lesson here is that you don't really need to get to know a person before getting married. Well, maybe that's an oversimplification. I think there has to be attraction, you have to know each other as well as you can without the benefit of years, and you have to get along.

When people have asked me the secret to the success of my marriage, I always give the same answer: our values are aligned. We want the same things. We are committed to the same things. We agree on how or kids should be raised. We worship in the same way. We like a lot of the same things, and more importantly, we believe the same things.

Our values are aligned. What does this mean?

We are committed to one another and we believe in the institution of marriage. We believe we made a commitment that must be honored for life. We didn't take the decision to get married lightly so it stands to reason that a decision to part ways would also be taken seriously.

Our values are aligned when it comes to money, to family, to work, to everything. This is why our marriage works.

This is not to say that we have a perfect marriage. No one does. We have our ups and downs. We fight. We disagree. We get on each other's nerves. I always love my wife. I don't always like her. I'm sure she would say the same thing about me. Maybe she won't be as nice about it as I am not as lovable as I'd like to believe I am.

That being said, Happy Birthday, Abdaliz. I love you now and always.

When No One is Watching

December 13, 2021

 I've heard it said that character is what you do when no one is watching. I believe this. I also believe character is revealed when we don't know exactly who has their eye on us.

We had a situation last week. A client came into our place of business, upset about something that had nothing to do with us. An IT situation was affecting 427 of our clients. All of them understood that we were working hard to make our clients' life easier. All except one. 

This poor excuse for a man decided to berate my wife while I was working with other clients. He left her in tears. When I approached him to ask if he'd like to talk to me this way. He said he had nothing to say to me. I (not) very calmly informed him that if he ever spoke to my wife that way again, he would leave this place in an ambulance.

I'm not proud of my behavior, but the fact that I didn't crush his larynx is proof of what a kind and patient man I am.

Why? Because when our security guard approached him and explained that I was angry because I was defending my wife, his answer was, "oh, I didn't realize he was her husband." as if attacking an unattached woman is somehow okay.

I am all for equality between men and women. I believe in equal treatment and protection under the law. But I recognize that we are not the same. Men are stronger and more aggressive. More often than not, in domestic violence situations, it is the man who assaults the woman. A man yells and exhibits violent behavior to a woman, she is likely going to be intimidated.

This man understood this. He chose to be a jerk and scare a woman. I made him eat his own cooking. He didn't like it at all.

We can be equal and still recognize our differences. Men are physically stronger than women. Women beat men at everything else.

What If I Don't Like Cake?

Today is my 50th Birthday! Holy crap, when you say it like that. All the cliches apply. I don't feel any different. I look the same as I did yesterday. Everything still works the same, for the most part.

I used to refer to my birthday as inventory day. I would take the day to reflect on the previous 365 days and determine if my life was moving in the right direction. Some people call it a Cake Day. I don't think that's fair to people who don't like cake. I love cake. Don't believe me? I can take my shirt off to prove it. We re-brand everything. This is nothing new, it's just that our re-branding, like everything else, happens faster than it used to. You hardly get used to the new word for something before it becomes the old world for something.

My wife and I have been together 21 years. We realized a couple of days ago, as we were signing documents for work to be done on our house, that it was the 18th anniversary of the day we moved in. It's nice to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Being married to the same woman and living in the same house for so long may sound unexciting to some, but I am happy and grateful, and while there have been some low points, we really manage to keep it exciting, fresh, and interesting. We never had a honeymoon, so we decided our life now will be one very long honeymoon with breaks for work and family, etc. Life gave us lemons. We froze them for a while and now we're making margaritas!

Now that I'm at the half-century mark, I am supposed to have new perspectives and wisdom. I don't. My philosophy and worldview did not change overnight. From this point of view, age is really just a number. My knees may disagree.

I got my convertible a few years ago. This year, I got a motorcycle. Who knows what sixty will bring?

Adolfo Jimenez is an author, poet, and blogger. He lives in Hollywood, Florida. He has published ten books, which you can find here.

Staring Down The Barrel

In six days, I will be fifty years old. Damn. It only matters when you think about it. Unfortunately, you think about it all the time. I feel no different than I did yesterday. The same aches and pains have followed me around for years. My fault for living a relatively sedentary life. I do walk a lot and my business keeps me active, but I don't exercise in the traditional sense.

So the years keep coming. Until they don't. Who knows what's next.

Age shows up in strange ways. Like having a coffee with your cheeseburger at McDonald's. And mail seems to be very important to me now. I mean, I check the mailbox on Sundays and national holidays. Yesterday, I got home and I looked and,,, no mail! I was genuinely baffled. I came inside and it turned out my daughter had brought it in. I grounded her. Took away her phone. If she wants to cut off my communication with the outside world, so be it! Two can play at that game.

I find that even though I know I will likely live another 30-plus years, I feel like I have to squeeze in as much as possible. I wish I'd had this feeling when I was twenty. How much more could I have accomplished? God only knows.

I am at once crankier and more laid back. I let things go that used to drive me up the wall, and I am annoyed by things that didn't matter a few short years ago. 

I spent so much of my youth worrying about the world and consuming every scrap of news I could get my hands on that now, when I see the world is burning, I make s'mores.

I am convinced the world is worse than it's ever been, just like my father did. And his father before him, and his father, and so on and so forth.

I am proud of the things I can still do. I miss the things I no longer can do. The ones I remember, anyway.

I am proud to still be married. I am prouder still that I love her more than ever.

I value my time and do all I can to save it and make it count. Then I plop my fat ass down in front of the TV, which is something I didn't used to do.

I am self-aware. This essay proves it.

I have no idea what is going on in the world around me. This essay proves it. (I'm proud of that one.) I let my children live their lives. I only guide when I am invited onto the raft. Otherwise, like everything in this life, I just let them go with the flow.

I guess I should confess that I didn't take my kid's phone away or ground her. But I thought about it.

Adolfo Jimenez is an author, poet, and blogger. He lives in Hollywood, Florida. He has published ten books, which you can find here.

A Contactless Future

 The COVID-19 plandemic and its fallout should have become a distant memory by now, but the government would never let such a useful “crisis” go to waste. They made the mistake of giving us an inch, we took a mile, and now the Delta Variant has been unleashed upon the populace.

As I sit here in the early morning gloom of a rainy South Florida summer day, I am browsing articles, investment opportunities, and the like. I keep finding how Contactless features have been incorporated into everything from groceries to real estate transactions. Even as the pandemic fails, the main symptom, which is the fear of coming into close proximity to other people, keeps getting its lease on life extended.

Add this to cancel culture, critical race theory, political correctness, and the general vitriol we are living with here in Don and Joe’s Great American Experiment, and it’s getting harder to feel optimistic about America’s future.

I am a touchy-feely guy, though I save that mostly for my loved ones. I don’t want to never shake a stranger’s hand. I don’t want to be afraid to hand something, anything, to another human being. I am not an island and I don’t want to be. 

Give me contact or give me death!

Adolfo Jimenez is an author, poet, and blogger. He lives in Hollywood, Florida. He has published ten books, which you can find here.

Death and Distance

It’s about five in the morning Montana time. The sun is out though not yet shining as brightly as I hope it will the rest of the day. I am in bed. I hear the familiar, rhythmic buzz of my phone. A call is coming in. Someone back home on the East Coast. Someone who doesn’t know where I am. Not that it matters. I’ll only be here a week. I hope I keep my sleep pattern just as it is until I return.

It is a family friend calling. My uncle in Cuba passed away in the night. My mother’s brother. My mom is still sleeping. That’s good. She needs her rest with all she’s been through. The friend asks if she should wake mom and tell her the news or would I like to tell her. I think this kind of news should be delivered in person whenever possible.

I sent a message to my cousin in Cuba, offering her my condolences for the death of her father. She called me a few minutes later. We chat and I again offer my sympathies. My wife is awake now and I tell her what has happened while we were sleeping. The family friend calls a few minutes later to let me know she has spoken with my mom. I call her and she is, understandably, upset. I tell her to stay calm and to not drive or stress herself out. She tells me that if the initial shock didn’t kill her, none of this will. Her little brother is dead. She has to tell her big sister, my aunt.

The news of my uncle’s death passed from Cuba to Hialeah, Florida, to West Yellowstone, Montana, back to Hialeah, to my mother, who was right next to the family friend who called me with the news in the first place. In the meantime, I spoke to my cousin, who is about two thousand miles away but only about three hundred miles away from my mother, who will eventually call her sister who is about ten miles away in Pembroke Pines, Florida.

Because my uncle died in Cuba, we will not be able to attend his funeral. We will not get together and share memories and laugh and cry the way one does to cope with the loss. We will talk or text. We may receive pictures but we will not hear the music or the sobs. Our shoulders will remain dry as we will not be able to offer them to comfort a relative. We will each grieve our own grief and cry our own tears. Our pain will be more personal. The loss will not be shared, but divided. Each of us will carry our own piece of it.

Adolfo Jimenez is an author, poet, and blogger. He lives in Hollywood, Florida. He has published ten books, which you can find here.